Wednesday, November 27, 2013

On December 27, 2008, a couple of hundred police cadets
gathered for a graduation ceremony. They represented the hope of 1.5million citizens of Gaza for stability after years of chaos and corruption.Suddenly, there was an explosion! An F-16, provided by the U.S., launched
a laser-guided missile into the midst of them and forty young academy trained
peacekeepers lay dead. This was the first of sixty Israeli jets sent to destroy
police stations, schools, mosques, sanitation facilities and chicken coops all
across the Gaza Strip. [1]

Of course, I knew nothing about this. I had been in church
singing, “O Come, O Come Emmanuel, and ransom captive Israel.”

Max Blumenthal writes:

At dawn on January 4,Israeli troops burst into the home of Ateya
al-Samouni with their faces blackened for night combat, and tossed a percussion
grenade into the center of his salon. When Samouni approached the soldiers with
his arms up, waving an Israeli drivers license and his ID, declaring that he
was the owner and was unarmed, they shot him and left him to bleed to death
while they opened fire on twenty members of his family, badly wounding a
four-year old child…Inside the house, the trapped family listened with horror
as an American-made Apache helicopter hovered overhead then launched a
fusillade of missiles into the house, reducing it to rubble. Nineteen members
of the Samouni clan died immediately, and several others lay bleeding heavily.[2]

Again, I knew nothing about the plight of the Samouni
family, even though such atrocities are common in the history of Israel’s abuse
of the Palestinians.I was in church
listening to a singer belt out, “Go down Moses, tell ol’ Pharaoh, Let my people
go.” By the end of the solo, everybody in church felt sorry for the poor Hebrew
slaves and celebrated their exodus..

Exodus is the theme song of liberation theologians. God is
on the side of the oppressed.But even
here, we seldom hear about the other end of it, the end where Joshua invades the
Canaanites and wipes them out.

And we captured all his cities at
that timeand utterly destroyed every
city, men, women, and children; we left none remaining.(Deuteronomy 2:34)

For it was the Lord’s doing to
harden their hearts that they should come out against Israel in
battle, in order that they should be utterly destroyed, and receive no mercy
but be exterminated. (Joshua 11:20)

This may be Israel’s
God but it is not the God I worship. To those who say, “But you have
to realize that these text were written within a completely different context
than the one in which we live today.” I say, OK, but I am reading them in today’s
context, which is a time when Israel
is known for its dehumanizing actions against the people of Palestine. It’s also a time when the majority of people
in America have for 62 years heard far more each week about Israel
as a state than Israel
as an ancient God fearing people.

In my church, our new Hymnal has an entire section entitled “God’s
Covenant with Israel.”I would be more pleased if it had a section on
God’s Covenant with the Poor, or even Our Covenant with the Oppressed…but Israel!???

Some Israeli soldiers wear T shirts expressing their attitude
toward Palestinians.One T shirt reads
“Better use Durex,” (a popular brand of condoms in Israel.) Beneath it is a
picture of a Palestinian mother weeping over the body of her dead child still
holding his teddy bear.The message is
clear.We don’t want you to have
children and if you do, this is how they will be treated.Another worn by a sharpshooter from the
Givati Brigade “shows a pregnant Palestinian woman with a bull’s eye
superimposed on her belly with the slogan, ‘1 shot, 2 kills.”[3]These are not worn by hoodlums on the street.These are soldiers of Israel, on duty
and under orders. And all the time, I am confronted withhymns proclaiming our covenant with Israel.

I understand that Christianity grew out of Judaism and we owe
a debt to biblical Israel
for monotheism. I am also aware that Jesus stood on the shoulders of the Hebrew
prophets when he called for social justice.At the same time I hear William Sloan Coffin when he says,“When someone says, ‘You gotta believe it
cause it’s in the Bible,’ You can bet your bottom dollar that the person saying
that is not referring to the Sermon on the Mount.”

Gaza
is surrounded by sniper towers, walls, check points and tanks. Yousef Aljamal
watched his little sister die while being denied a permit to get to the
hospital for surgery.For this reason,
I get sensitive in church when the Call to Worship begins with “Bless the Lord
God of Israel,” (Luke 1:68)
or we read Psalm 121, “Behold, He that keeps Israel will neither slumber nor
sleep.”I want to say, Bless the God of
Aljamal’s little sister, the God who sides with the poor and oppressed.

Maybe I am too sensitive, but the Zionist language in our church
liturgy bothers me. “O Come, O Come Emmanuel and ransom captive Israel,” sounds like the playbook for the “poor
me, victim image,” so promoted by Israel, many American Jews and most
of our media.I know, intelligent people
can figure out that this hymn refers to ancient Israel and not the government of
Benjamin Netanyahu, but I wonder how many people sitting in our pews actually reason
this out.At least emotionally, “poor Israel is what we
are left feeling.

In the church in which I worship, we have a progressive
minister who preaches the gospel of liberation theology.He fearlessly addresses such subjects as gun
violence, climate change, immigration, economic inequality and many other justice
issues.For this I am grateful. However,
in a day, when Israel
transfers water, builds an apartheid wall that denies Palestinians access to
hospitals and schools, I wonder why we are in church singing praises to the God of Abraham rather than raising
hell about Israel’s
oppression and power policies that hold millions of people in the world’s
largest open air prison. Our worship liturgy has us singing “Torah ora…” We confess, “You are the hope of Israel.”We receive assurance that “We are the children
of Zion.” I
appreciate the eagerness to not offend our Jewish neighbors, but is there not an
unintended subliminal message of condoning the conduct of Israel’s
Zionist government in our silence? When so much of what we hear every day
through the news media is pro-Zionist, and our politicians offering total
support of Israel and the church being voiceless about the Christian Zionist right
wing heresy, I would hope that the church, called to be in solidarity with the
poor and oppressed, would bend over backward to not appear to lend support to
that political position.

Maybe Samouni would understand that our liturgy refers only to
ancient Israel.
Maybe he could understand why we do not
want to say anything that might get us labeled anti-Semitic.Maybe someday, he will reason that what Gaza is experiencing is
just a passing phase and that when the dust settles he will think that the
church really did care that his home and dignity were stolen from him. Maybe he
will understand that our worship is nothing but inherited liturgy. He might
even be comfortable with the price of silence as something we are expected to
pay to maintain a congenial relationship with our Jewish friends. Maybe he will
understand all that. But I don’t. I want to separate myself from anything that
could be read as supporting the brutal policies of Zionism.

Years ago, some of the brightest minds in the church became
sensitive to “Sexist language.” being sung, prayed and preached week after
week. Surely they could understand that everybody knows God is not a male and when
we refer to the Almighty as “Father” or “He,” women are also included. However, the feminist theologians kept
pointing out that most people cannot separate their theological acumen from the
emotional impression being driven into their psyche by repeated references to
God in masculine termsSo, today, we
have a more sensitive liturgy, and sing from a more gender inclusive hymnbook.
We pray to God as Father and Mother, even
if sometimes the language is awkward and un-rhythmical.The feminist theologians were right.

Today, with so many American Jews committed to the state of Israel, even people of conscience hesitate to speak
out critically of Israel,In spite of its atrocities, Israelgets an apartheid pass. Why? Because most
Westerners still see the Palestinian through the eyes of what Edward Said calls
Orientalism.

A white middle-class Westerner
believes it is his human prerogative not only to manage the nonwhite world but
also to own it, just because by definition “it” is not quite as human as “we”
are.[4]

Israel
has betrayed the Jewish community. But that is not my responsibility. I fear that
the church is betraying the Christian and Muslim community of Palestine and that is my responsibility.

Thomas
Are

November
26, 2013

[1]
See,Mex Blumenthal, Goliath,(Nation Books, New York,2013) p. 3-4. for this and other sources referred to in this post.I urge you to read this book.

Thomas L. Are

I preached for forty three years in the Presbyterian Church before retiring. If anyone would ever refer to me as a Liberation Theologian, I would be pleased. I started blogging several years ago to express my political and religious concern for justice, especially justice for the Palestinians.